The Wisdom in the Undergrowth: Sustaining Antifragility in Real Life

© Martha Wooding-Young, The Resilient Executive LLC, efflorescence of the mycelial network in our third year at the farm

Tiny mushrooms don’t look like power. But power doesn’t always roar. Sometimes it listens. Sometimes it decomposes what’s no longer needed. Sometimes it connects quietly underground moving vital nutrients around the system without anyone noticing.

As we come to the close of this series on antifragility, I want to offer something often missing in conversations about growth, leadership, or systems change:

Sustainability.

Not the corporate reporting kind. The kind that lives in your breath. Your body. Your relationships. The kind that, like a mycelial network, depends on decomposition as much as creation.

Because here’s what I know from decades of Wall Street and now leadership coaching: building antifragile leadership and culture isn’t a one-and-done effort. It’s a living process, full of cycles—growth, decay, stillness, surprise. And if we don’t honor those rhythms, we risk turning even our wisest strategies into performance theater. Sustainable leadership is not for everyone. It requires great courage and a higher than usual capacity to remain with the discomfort of uncertainty. But in a world where uncertainty is all there is, that’s a capacity worth cultivating.

Beyond the Breakthrough: Why Integration Matters

If your nervous system isn’t on board, your strategy won’t stick.

The real work of antifragility doesn’t end with a great offsite or a smart restructuring. It continues in how we metabolize challenge over time—how we let insight compost into behavior, and behavior into culture.

Think of tiny mushrooms emerging after rain: quiet signs that the invisible web of life below the surface is doing its work. When we moved to the farm, it had been roughly used by prior owners and their animals, with chemicals and all manner of unnatural and even dangerous interventions. It has taken three years of careful regenerative tending for our mycelial network at the farm to recover and burst forth in an astonishing array of mushrooms and lichen. Leaders need space for that same quiet emergence. No quick fixes like the mess Wall Street made by adding new compliance check-ins when their investment banking analysts were literally dropping dead. Today’s leaders need not just clarity—but digestion. Not just insight—but integration.

How to Stay with the Work—Without Burning Out

So how do we sustain this path when the pressures keep coming?

1. Make Space for Micro-Recovery

You don’t need a sabbatical to restore. You need moments—woven into the fabric of your day. A slow sip of water. Three breaths before a decision. A look out the window before you answer that Slack. Tuning in to the feeling of gravity beneath your feet for a moment or two. These are nervous system resets, not luxuries.

🌱 Try this: Bookend your day with nature if possible—morning light, evening breeze. If not, bring a bit of nature to your desk. A leaf, a rock, even a soundscape can help remind the body of its natural rhythm.

2. Normalize the Dip

After any stretch of growth—personal, cultural, organizational—there will be a dip. It’s not regression. It’s recovery. Expect it. Protect it. Integrate it.

🌱 Try this: Build in decompression after high-output periods. Instead of rushing to the next challenge, pause to ask: What did we learn? What do we need to let go of?

3. Let the System Talk Back

Antifragile cultures listen to themselves. Through pulse checks, storytelling, quiet sensing spaces—not just surveys. These aren’t just touchy-feely practices. They’re vital feedback loops.

🌱 Try this: In your next team meeting, ask: What’s trying to emerge here that we’re not naming yet? Then let silence do some of the talking.

4. Stay in Relationship

Stress isolates. Presence connects. When we maintain authentic, grounded relationships—across power, across difference—we hold more complexity without collapse.

🌱 Try this: Reach out to one person in your network not because you need something, but because you’re thinking of them. In antifragile systems, the relationship is the resolution.

The Hidden Wisdom of the Mycelium

Tiny mushrooms teach us something big: most of what sustains us is unseen. Underground fungal networks are the core of healthy of ecosystems. They connect plant roots and facilitate transfers of nutrients, water, and communication signals between various species. They enhance the fertility of the soil, helping plants thrive. 

I invite you to identify and to celebrate your equivalent of the underground fungal network. What is the web of relationships that enables you to thrive? Not just the obvious bonds, but the subtle ones, too. Antifragility isn’t about being unbreakable. It’s about being deeply, relationally rooted—so that even when something falls, there’s a system that holds, learns, and eventually regenerates in an adaptive growth cycle.

What if that was our model for leadership?
Not the lone hero at the top, but a web of wise, quiet connectors?
Not constant growth, but elegant decomposition and renewal?

It starts with one question:
What are you nourishing right now, quietly, that might support something beautiful later? Want a thought partner to figure out what’s possible now that wasn’t possible before? Let’s chat. 

🔗 In Case You Missed the Series 

Part 1 – The Cracking Core: Why Manager Burnout Should Worry All of Us
🔍 Burnout isn’t just personal—it’s neurological, cultural, and systemic. We explore how chronic stress rewires the brain and erodes leadership capacity from the inside out.

Part 2 – Beyond Burnout: Building Antifragile Leaders from the Inside Out
🌿 Antifragile leaders grow stronger through stress. This piece introduces the neuroscience behind adaptive leadership and presence under pressure.

Part 3 – Practices of the Antifragile Leader: Training the Nervous System for Complexity
🧠 Practical tools for cultivating presence, compassion, and internal flexibility. We cover five trainable practices that turn insight into embodied leadership.

Part 4 – Designing Antifragile Organizations: Culture That Learns from Stress
🌐 Zooming out to the system level, we look at how organizations can metabolize challenge through networked intelligence, regenerative pacing, and nervous system literacy.

Part 5 – The Wisdom in the Undergrowth: Sustaining Antifragility in Real Life
🍄 The final piece reminds us that real change is cyclical, not linear—and that the deepest power often lies in the quiet, unseen systems that sustain us.